A 12th-century sultan ordered it built to carry water from
the Nile to Cairo. Napoleon filled in the arches and turned
it into a wall. Now, after another year of severe drought
in the Middle East, the government has ordered the city’s
ancient aqueduct restored to slake the thirst of modern
Egyptians.

The project, which will take two years to complete at a
cost of U.S. $11 million, dramatizes the importance of one
of the major keys to peace in the Middle East: water. Experts
say that a lack of agreement on how the region’s scarce
resources should be divided not only could wreck any peace
deal with Israel, but could actually lead to new outbreaks
of war among the Arab states.

“People outside of the region tend not to hear about the
issue,” says a U.S. State Department official. “It just
doesn’t make the news. But there are talks all the time
among water specialists. Guaranteeing fair access to water
is critical to any peace agreement.”

Palestinian official Fadl Ka-wash declared yesterday on
the official government radio station that water “is no
less important and serious than any other final status issues
on the agenda of the Camp David summit” between the Palestinian
National Authority President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Barak.

RUNNING ON LOW

In a region with a population of 12 million and about as
much rainfall every year as Phoenix, Arizona, water weighs
heavily in the concerns of Palestinians, Jordanians, and
Israelis over their joint futures together. Forty percent
of Israel’s water supply comes from aquifers beneath the
occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. About 25 percent comes
from the Sea of Galilee, which helps explain why Israelis
balked when Syria this spring insisted on giving up control
of the shoreline as well as the entire Golan Heights—often
called the “water tower of the Middle East”—as the price
of peace.

Even though it controls most of its water resources now,
Israel is running dry. Last spring, in the midst of the
worst drought since 1990-91, the cabinet decreed a 40 percent
reduction in subsidized water allocations for farmers and
promised compensation to farmers for their losses. The leading
newspaper Ha’aretz, citing the possibility of more years
of reduced rainfall and an “imminent threat to the supply
of drinking water,” called on the government to set “special
regulations to reduce urban consumption and educational
activities to promote water conservation.”

GREEN LAWNS, DRY TAPS

While water shortages are proving an annoyance to Israeli
citizens, they are angering the Palestinians. At one point
Palestinian officials in Hebron—hardest-hit of the West
Bank cities—limited households to running water only twice
per month.

Most West Bank water still flows through Israeli pipes,
despite the existing agreement yielding control over the
territory to the Palestinian Authority. Palestinians claim
their average citizen receives less than one-third as much
water as the average Israeli, and criticize California-style
watered lawns and vat-sized bathtubs in Israel.

A study released this spring by the U.S. National Academy
of Sciences and counterpart groups from Israel, Jordan,
and the Palestinian Authority confirmed that Israel’s per
capita water use in 1994 was nearly quadruple that of the
West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But Israel and its immediate neighbors aren’t the only Middle-Eastern
states with water problems. The Egyptian aqueduct project
was spurred partly by predictions that the country’s water
needs will rise 30 percent by 2017. Water Resources Minister
Mahmoud Abu Zaid told a January symposium at Cairo University
that Egypt will have to find an extra 20 billion cubic meters
of water by then to meet the demands of its rapidly growing
population.

In Egypt as elsewhere, agriculture is a prime consumer of
water, especially since 1977, when the government embarked
on an ambitious irrigation program in the northeast to help
feed the country’s 68 million people.

MOVING IT AROUND

Several Arab states are busy moving their dwindling water
supplies around to serve the neediest areas. Iran—which
has set up a crisis committee to deal with water shortages
in Tehran—recently opened a 207-mile (333-kilometer) pipeline
to supply water from the Zayandeh River in central Iran
to the desert province of Yazd. President Mohammad Khatami
visited his native region in March to inaugurate the U.S.
$88.6-million pipeline, which the official news agency called
the largest water transfer project in the Middle East.

The government of Iraq in March began digging a canal to
take water from the Tigris River to drought-stricken lands
north of Baghdad—part of emergency measures ordered by President
Saddam Hussein to cope with water shortages. Saddam also
ordered relief measures for the western town of Rawa, where
falling levels in Lake Qadissiyah and in the Euphrates River
have caused a drinking-water crisis. Water levels in the
Tigris—which along with the Euphrates form the major sources
of Iraq’s supplies—have been falling sharply because of
slack rainfall over the past three years. The government
also has bitterly complained that the situation has been
worsened by dams built upstream, further reducing the flows.

Dams, in fact, have become a source of dangerous friction
that could lead to war, in the opinion of some of the ministers
from nations attending a World Water Forum held in the Hague
in March.

“Worldwide, at least 214 rivers flow through two or more
countries, but no enforceable law governs the allocation
and use of international waters,” said Sandra Postel, a
senior researcher for the U.S. based environmental group
Worldwatch Institute.

WATER WARS?

Many believe the biggest flash-point is the Middle East
with its desert climate, shrinking aquifers, staggering
rates of population growth, and tradition of settling differences
by fighting.

“Many of the wars of this [20th] century were about oil,”
World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin once observed,
“but the wars of the next century will be about water.”

No country is so dependent on a single lifeline as Egypt
is on the Nile—the source of which lies several countries
to the south. Eighty percent of Iraq’s water originates
outside its borders. Turkey controls most of the headwaters
of the Tigris and Euphrates, the twin rivers upon which
both Syria and Iraq depend.

Syria and Iraq are gravely concerned about the effects that
water-rich Turkey’s massive Southeastern Anatolian Project,
with its dam system, will have on their stretches of the
Tigris and Euphrates.

Former Turkish President Turgut Ozal a decade ago proposed
a “peace pipeline” to sell surplus water from the Seyhan
and Ceyhan rivers to parched countries on the Arabian Peninsula.
Experts estimated that such a project would cost billions
of dollars and take a decade to build. But the most daunting
challenge to such a project—or any other regional water-sharing
arrangement—would be getting nations that often have warred
against each other to cooperate.

In the end, a pan-Arab deal on water resources that takes
into account Israel’s concerns may not only be a price of
peace in the region. Peace might be the price of such a
deal.

Eye in the Sky is a weekly series that brings you the story behind the headlines using satellite imagery, remote sensing, aerial photography, and maps. This feature is developed by National Geographic News with the sponsorship of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) and Earth-Info. Check out maps and imagery at http://www.earth-info.org.

 A recent international study found Israel’s per capita water use to be four times that of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—whose water still runs through Israeli pipes—but only marginally greater than that of Jordan. Annual rainfall in Israel ranges between 40 inches (1,000 mm) at the northernmost point and 1.24 inches (31 mm) at the southern tip—nearly all of it coming between November and February. As much as 60 percent of Israel’s total rainfall evaporates, 5 percent runs into the sea, and the remaining 35 percent seeps into the ground, where it gathers in natural aquifers. According to the Bible, the Jordan River—whose headwaters are in the disputed Golan Heights—once upon a time miraculously and suddenly stopped flowing, allowing the Israelites to cross into the Promised Land.

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COPING WITH THE DRY

Israel has taken a position of world leadership in finding ways of coping with dry climates, including laying plans for desalinating seawater on a large scale. Among other recent innovations:

An agricultural company has developed a new strain of cotton that requires only one-third of the water normally used for cotton plants. The company plans to market the new strain in Peru, Spain, Turkey, and Greece.

The Kibbutz Erez has developed a method of purifying waste water in cowsheds. After the cows are hosed down, a fast-growing water plant floated on the surface of the runoff pool raises the quality of the water—and provides a nutritious green food for the cows.

A farm owner at a Negev Desert oasis has discovered that the sabra—a prickly pear fruit of a desert cactus—can produce several sweet products beyond its own sweet soft interior. Noam Blum reported that, “We produce pickles from the sabras, and also various snacks and spicy paste.”